General Motors has revealed details of its driverless cars and the news that it could mass produce them in a flash if autonomous vehicles got the go ahead to be a real life replacement to cars.
Kyle Vogt, the CEO and founder of Cruise Automation, the driverless car startup acquired by General Motors explained in a blog post that these cars feature everything regular cars do, such as airbags, crumple zones and comfortable seats.
They’re ready to be produced in their thousands. In fact, GM said it could manufacture hundreds of thousands of them every year.
“The car we’re unveiling today is actually our 3rd generation self-driving car, but it’s the first that meets the redundancy and safety requirements we believe are necessary to operate without a driver,” Vogt said on a post via Medium. “There’s no other car like this in existence.”
Their first mainstream duty will be to take Cruise’s employees to meetings, to the office and home. They can be summoned using the app and although will have a human behind the wheel, that doesn’t have to be the case if GM gets government approval.
“They’ve been designed to emulate human driving behavior but with the human mistakes omitted,” Vogt added. “They don’t drink and drive, they don’t text while driving, and they don’t get tired.”
He said it’s taken more than two thousand people to get to this stage of GM’s driverless car journey, with the cars being adapted and tweaked to make sure they are completely up to date with changing trends and of course, changing legislation.
They’ve clocked up hundreds of thousands of miles of testing and every journey has resulted in software tweaks to make sure they can deal with any scenario at all.
“The launch of the world’s first mass-producible driverless car is a major accomplishment, but we’re not across the finish line yet,” Vogt explained. “Building a few of these self-driving vehicles, or even a few hundred, won’t accomplish what we set out to do.
“And a self-driving business that depends on humans sitting behind the wheel is fundamentally unsustainable, so that won’t cut it either. We will achieve success by integrating the best software and hardware to deploy truly driverless vehicles at scale.”
